Marguerite Barankitse awarded Aurora Prize

Today, Yerevan has held a ceremony of awarding the first humanitarian Aurora Prize. The Aurora Prize was given to Marguerite Barankitse from the "Shalom House" and the REMA hospital in Burundi, who saved thousands of people and took care for orphans and refugees during the civil war.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the Aurora Prize was established in the framework of the 100 LIVES project of the "Armenian Development Initiative" Charity Foundation. The Aurora Prize is awarded to people who risk their lives to help others to survive and promote the ideas of humanism.

Marguerite Barankitse grew up in Burundi in East Africa. She is a native of Tutsi, the tribe, which during the Civil War organized destruction of another tribe of Hutu. However, in 1993, at the peak of the war, Marguerite Barankitse herself hid a group of Hutu people in the land of the Catholic diocese, where she worked at that time.

According to Marguerite Barankitse, she was an eyewitness to severe massacres, beatings of young people by policemen, and deaths of her own seven children. The woman was persecuted by the government; she received threats and was forced to flee from her homeland.

Marguerite Barankitse saved 30,000 children whose parents died during the war or the AIDS epidemic. In 2008, she opened a hospital, and at present, more than 80,000 patients receive medical help there.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.